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Adnan Shihab-Eldin wins Haas International Award

EECS alumnus Adnan Shihab-Eldin (B.S. '65) has won the 2017 Elise and Walter A. Haas International Award, which honors a Berkeley alumnus/a who is a native, citizen, and resident of another country and who has a distinguished record of service to that country in any field. Shihab-Eldin is "a visionary leader in the field of energy globally, well respected by energy ministries and heads of state throughout the energy-producing world. He is also widely recognized as a pre-eminent world expert on energy technology, economics, and the environment." His "contributions have not only helped to facilitate and advance Kuwait’s scientific and innovation ecosystem, but has also strengthened solid foundations for research and development in the wider Middle East region. He has used his expertise to further socioeconomic growth in Kuwait and the Arab Region through scientific and economic research, inspiring a culture of development and innovation."

Urmila Mahadev Solves Quantum Verification Problem

CS postdoctoral researcher Urmila Mahadev (advisor: Umesh Vazirani) has come up with an interactive protocol by which users with no quantum powers of their own can employ cryptography to put a harness on a quantum computer and drive it wherever they want, with the certainty that the quantum computer is following their orders. Her work, which addressed the question "How do you know whether a quantum computer has done anything quantum at all?" was awarded the “best paper” and “best student paper” prizes when it was presented at the Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science this month. CIT computer scientistThomas Vidick calls her result “one of the most outstanding ideas to have emerged at the interface of quantum computing and theoretical computer science in recent years.”

Celebrating Women in STEM: Video Game Designer Carol Shaw

EECS alumna Carol Shaw (EE B.S. '77/CS M.S. '78), one of the first female industrial video grame designers, is the subject of a University of Missouri, Kansas City News article celebrating women in STEM. Shaw, who was always drawn to engineering and math, used punch cards and Fortran for her first programming class at Cal. She became one of the first professional female video game developers when she joined Atari after graduating 1978. in 1980, Shaw’s “Tic-Tac-Toe” became the first commercially released video game designed by a woman. She developed a scrolling format for her second game, "River Raid," while working at Activision. It won several awards, including Inforworld’s Best Action Game and Best Atari 8-bit Game of the Year, when it was released in 1982. Vintage Computing and Gaming magazine said that River Raid is "almost universally regarded as a masterpiece of game design."

Deborah Estrin receives MacArthur ‘genius’ award

2008 Distinguished CS Alumna Deborah Estrin (B.S. EECS '80) has been awarded a 2018 'genius' grant from the the MacArthur Foundation. Winners are chosen for "solving long-standing scientific and mathematical problems, pushing art forms into new and emerging territories, and addressing the urgent needs of under-resourced communities." Estrin completed her graduate work at MIT before becoming a professor at USC, UCLA, and eventually Cornell Tech in New York, where she is currently Associate Dean. She designs "open-source platforms that leverage mobile devices and data to address socio-technological challenges such as personal health management." She was among the first to ascertain the potential of using the digital traces of people's daily lives for participatory mobile health.

Corelight wins 2018 Network Security Innovation Award

Corelight, a cybersecurity startup co-founded by CS Prof. Vern Paxson, has won the 2018 Network Security Innovation Award from CyberSecurity Breakthrough, an independent organization that recognizes the top companies, technologies and products in the global information security market. Corelight delivers "network visibility solutions for cybersecurity" by merging the power of an open source framework called Bro with a suite of enterprise features to create a line of sensors. These sensors make Bro dramatically easier to deploy in physical and virtual enterprise environments. The CyberSecurity Breakthrough Awards recognize "the world's best information security companies, products and people."

UC Berkeley named #2 Blockchain University by CoinDesk

UC Berkeley is ranked #2 on CoinDesk's list of Top 10 Blockchain Universities. Berkeley boasts "one of the most vibrant on-campus communities in the country. The student organization Blockchain@Berkeley both educates and builds products, performing paid consulting work for major companies like Airbus and Qualcomm. Berkeley's law and business schools also boast their own blockchain related clubs." Berkeley also offers interdisciplinary courses like "Blockchain, Cryptoeconomics, and the Future of Technology, Business and Law," which is taught by faculty from different disciplines. CoinDesk says this course"further cements Berkeley’s reputation as a leading educator." As the only public university on the list, Berkeley "demonstrates that universities can stay at forefront of emerging technologies without charging sky-high tuitions."

A low-cost community cellular networks project, run jointly by UC Berkeley (PI: CS Prof. Eric Brewer) and the University of Philippines-Diliman (UP-D), won the 2018 Information Society Innovation Fund (ISIF Asia) Community Networks Award. “Village Base Station-Connecting Communities through Mobile Networks” (VBTS-CoCoMoNets) establishes community cellular networks (CCNs) in rural sites in the Philippines. CCNs are low-power, low-cost 2G base stations that enable users to make basic calls and text in areas that traditional commercial cellular networks cannot reach. The ISIF awards support creative internet solutions to development needs in the Asia Pacific in an effort to promote positive social and economic development.

The life and career of EECS Prof. Ruzena Bajcsy were celebrated with a commemorative bobblehead doll in her image at the 2018 Grace Hopper Conference (GHC) in Houston, Texas, last week. Bajcsy was recognized alongside Engineering and CS legends Grace Hopper, Annie Easley, and Mae Jemison by GHC sponsor Liberty Mutual Insurance. Bajcsy is renowned for her innovations in robotics and computer vision, specifically the development of improved robotic perception and the creation of better methods to analyze medical images. In addition to founding the General Robotics and Active Sensory Perception (GRASP) Laboratory at UPenn, she headed the NSF Computer and Information Science and Engineering Directorate from 1999–2001, with authority over a $500 million budget.

Elizaveta Tremsina places first in Tapia 2018 poster session

Undergraduate Elizaveta Tremsina, a member of the EECS Honors Program who is triple-majoring in CS, Physics and Applied Math, took first place in the Microsoft-sponsored student research poster competition at the 2018 ACM Richard Tapia Celebration of Diversity in Computing. Her project, titled "Your Story Recorded in a Magnet: Micromagnetic Simulations of Spin-Orbit Torque in Multi-layer Structures," was overseen by Prof. Sayeef Salahuddin. She was part of one of the largest delegations of EECS students, staff, and faculty ever to participate in the Tapia conference, known as the premier venue to acknowledge, promote and celebrate diversity in computing. This year's conference, which was held last week in Orlando, Florida, promoted the theme "Diversity: Roots of Innovation."

Nico Deshler will present at Council on Undergraduate Research REU Symposium

Research undertaken by undergraduate student Nico Deshler will be presented at the Council on Undergraduate Research (CUR) Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) Symposium in Alexandria, VA, on October 28-29. Deshler's project, "Multi-Sensor Arrays: Augmenting 3D Reconstruction Volumes for Mask-Based Computational Cameras," was done as part of the CS Summer Undergraduate Program in Engineering Research at Berkeley (SUPERB) under the mentorship of Prof. Laura Waller and EECS PhD student, Kristina Monakhova. The goal of the EECS SUPERB Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) program is to prepare and motivate diverse, competitive candidates for graduate study.